September152011

"The artistic and literary scene that flourished paradoxically under censorship and repression has died off. ... The people of Central Europe traded in ideas for groceries and for not being beaten to death by the police.

Twenty years after the Velvet Revolution, Havel gave a public speech in
which he assessed the current state of the free Czech Republic. “On the
one hand everything is getting better — a new generation of mobile
phones is being released every week,” he said. “But in order to make
use of them, you need to follow new instructions. So you end up reading
instruction manuals instead of books and in your free time you watch TV
where handsome tanned guys scream from advertisements about how happy
they are to have new swimming trunks... The new consumer society is
accomplished by a growing number of people who do not create anything
of value.”

The artistic and literary scene that flourished paradoxically under
censorship and repression has died off. The public intellectual is, for
the most part, no longer invited to the most important parties. Anna
Porter writes, “Now that everyone can publish what they want, what is
the role of the intellectuals?” and she can’t find an answer. It’s no
longer the police state that’s attacking the intelligentsia — it’s
disinterest and boredom. It’s distraction. It’s a trade off. And it’s
one that we should be able to acknowledge and be allowed to mourn. When
the historian Timothy Garton Ash visited Poland in the 1980s, he
admitted to an envy for the environment there. “Here is a place where
people care, passionately, about ideas.” The people of Central Europe
traded in ideas for groceries and for not being beaten to death by the
police. No one could possibly blame them, but at the same time, Havel
and the other leaders had no sense of the true cost of democracy.

[...]

As F. S. Michaels writes in Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything,
“When you’re inside a master story at a particular time in history, you
tend to accept its definition of reality. You unconsciously believe and
act on certain things, and disbelieve and fail to act on other
things... Over time, the monoculture evolves into a nearly invisible
foundation that structures and shapes our lives, giving us our sense of
how the world works.”

[...]

”
Michaels’s book has its faults. Her summations of how the world once
work — meant to both show how much we’ve devoted to this economic story
today and remind us that things can be different — are tinged with the
hue that colors Ostalgie:
the backward-looking amnesia that infects those Central Europeans who
have decided things were so much better under communism, or, if you’re
in the right country, under the Habsburgs. “Back in the 1950s, the
relationship between employees and their companies involved commitment
and reciprocity; workers were committed to the job in return for wages
and promotions, and the company was committed to its workers in return
for their hard work and loyalty.” Well, maybe. But admittance to the
wider workforce was restricted at best. Such a point is like looking
back on the days of incredibly low unemployment in communist Poland...
without mentioning that if anyone protested for safer working
conditions, the police might just shoot him in the head. Every
monoculture will have its downsides, and trading one for another will
always lead to unexpected deficits. But maybe if we acknowledge that
the economic story looks like it’s coming to an unhappy ending of
environmental degradation, widespread poverty, and hunger as resources
become scarce, we can see what we might get in return.

Leaving the economic monoculture, particularly now that it’s a
worldwide system, is not going to be any less of a dramatic act than
Havel’s Velvet Revolution. Michaels makes a strong case that this story
is stripping us of our environment, our creativity, and our personal
happiness. We are, for the most part, bogged down in the daily struggle
for survival, too worried about losing our fragile position within a
corporation to envision an entirely different way of being. It’s going
to take another Havel, someone who can see the world for what it is and
find a better story to tell.

=============================

oAnth:

The problem with thatkind of books is
quite obviously, that they describe rather well the status quo, but
don't give sufficient answers by lack of an adequate analysis of the
socio-economic impact into the cultural and academic sphere, which is
causing the observed depletion.

April262011

Canadian readers should keep an eye out for Generation Us, a tiny climate change primer by University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis.

Subtitled The Challenge of Global Warming, Generation Us is like a climate change CliffNotes. Published by Raven Books as part of a "Rapid Reads" series, this is a short, succinct, clear and readable rendering of the science - followed by a passionate appeal for us all to move from "Generation Me" (which really seems to have outlasted its stylishness) to Generation Us, in which we start taking seriously the opportunity we have to mitigate the climate damage that we have already inflicted on future generations.

Actually, if you're looking for an informed tour through the science, I might recommend Weaver's earlier book even more highly. In Keeping Our Cool, Weaver drilled down into the topic a bit more thoroughly, even explaining precisely how scientists such as Lonnie Thompson torture 650,000-year-old oxygen isotopes to get them to admit what the temperature was on the year they were frozen into the Antarctic plains.

But for someone coming to this topic without any science background, GenUs is a perfect introduction - and as such is an important addition to the climate library.<!--break-->

August122010

August 11, 2010

There’s
a new book out on Internet policy that is essential reading for anyone
interested in Internet policy—and probably for anyone interested in the
law, economics, technology, or start-ups. I recommend it to everyone.
It’s that good.

Barbara van Schewick’s new book, “Internet Architecture and Innovation,” is one of the very few books in my field in the same league as Larry Lessig’s Code, in 2000, and Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks,
in 2006, in terms of its originality, depth, and importance to Internet
policy and other disciplines. I expect the book to affect how people
think about the Internet; about the interactions between law and
technical architectures in all areas of law; about entrepreneurship in
general. I also think her insights on innovation economics, which
strike me as far more persuasive than lawyers’ usual assumptions,
should influence “law and economics” thinking for the better.

The remainder of this post explains why this book is important and
eye-opening for everyone who reads books, not only for those who (like
me) have spent their careers in Internet policy.

The Author

Barbara van Schewick is well-known to Internet lawyers as a brilliant, extremely thorough lawyer. And engineer. And
expert on innovation economics. She was (with Yale’s Jack Balkin and
Harvard’s Charles Nesson) one of three academics joining consumer
groups to prompt the FCC’s 2008 investigation of Comcast interferinge with peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. The FCC’s 2009 open Internet proposal, in its background policy discussion, cites her scholarly work far more than any other scholar. Her law review articles advance novel, seminal critiques
of what economists considered “conventional wisdom” on the one-monopoly
profit principle and the role of competition in ensuring open
technology platforms. This scholarship was influential not only in the
US, but also in Europe and Canada’s recent Internet policy proceeding.

The Argument

The book addresses how–specifically–the Internet’s original
architecture has fostered tremendous innovation in consumer and
business software and therefore economic growth. The relationship
between innovation and the Internet’s architecture has been central to
government policy debates around the world–as well as to the business
plans of entrepreneurs and investors. While others have asserted and
guessed that the Internet’s architecture fosters economic innovation,
she puts these assertions on solid theoretical and empirical ground,
incorporating insights from engineering, management science, behavioral
economics, real options theory, network economics, evolutionary
economics, and legal policy. And you don’t have to know anything about
these areas in advance, as she doesn’t expect the reader to be expert
in one these fields. (Almost nobody could be expert in all of them.)

Each section of the book is valuable on its own terms. She begins
with a straightforward technical description of the Internet that is
helpful for all of us who’ve wondered how our email works. She then
develops a framework for analyzing the relationship between innovation
and constraints imposed by a technological architecture. She does this
with what some law professors would call a “law and economics”
approach. (In Wealth of Networks, Benkler also uses these
economic tools for his purposes.) The upshot of her analysis is that
innovation benefits from more innovators. Because the value of a
particular innovation is often impossible to predict in advance,
innovation benefits from many innovators, all with different
experiences and worldviews, experimenting and constantly adapting.
Other architectures would lead to fewer innovators and less
innovation–particularly architectures that increase costs to
innovators, and so eliminate much of the accidental and iterative
innovation we have experienced on the Internet.

Setting out this framework for thinking about issues, she then applies the framework to the Internet, contrasting its original
architecture, where anyone could innovate with few initial expenses,
and without seeking permission from any government or central office,
with a now-possible architecture that would require greater investment
and force innovators to negotiate with the
network-infrastructure-owners to bring innovative ideas to market.

She ends with a discussion of policy, identifying the features of
the Internet’s architecture that we must preserve to ensure robust
innovation, and discussing the proper role of government policy in
preserving architectural features necessary for innovation.

My Favorite Part

This is one of those rare books where every chapter is full of novel
and important ideas. But I’ll tell you about my very favorite part. In
the eighth chapter, beginning with “The Value of Many Innovators,” van
Schewick presents the stories of how several major technologies were
born: Google, Flickr, EBay, 37Signals, Twitter, and even the World Wide
Web, email, and web-based email. I had always suspected that the
“accidental” beginnings and unexpected successes of these technologies
were a series flukes, one fluke after another. Rather, van Schewick
explains, it’s a pattern. Her models actually predict the pattern
accurately–unlike other academic models like the efficient market
hypothesis and theories on valuing derivatives. These entrepreneurial
stories (or case studies, to academics) are eye-opening; they’re also
counter-intuitive unless you consider the management science and
evolutionary economics van Schewick applies to analyze them. So if you
wondered what the invention of Flickr, Google, Twitter, and the World
Wide Web had in common, van Schewick answers the question.

And … the Book’s Intimidation Factor

Most of you are not techies. Like me, you may have studied the humanities or law. I consider you my people.

But don’t be so intimidated by the title that you miss out on van Schewick’s important ideas.

For the terminally intimidated, I recommend beginning with van Schewick’s short, concrete, straight-forward testimony to governments (see here and here and here) and an amicus brief.

For others, I will list the things-that-I-know-scare-you-but-should-not.

1. Her name. “van Schewick.” What an intimidating, scary German name, worthy of a Dr. Strangelove scene or an Austin Powers
movie. I know. But no worries. Despite her meticulous thoroughness,
her German accent, and her “van”–her academic writing is gentle and
clear. It’s not turgid like those H-Germans, Habermas or Heidegger. In
fact, she knows her book “crosses a number of disciplines,” like
engineering, economics, and law and had consciously aimed to make it
“accessible to all” of us who have different backgrounds. There are
zero equations in the text. And equations can be scary to lawyers and
law students.

2. Equations. Nope. No need to worry. Not one of those books.

3. The difficult concepts. van Schewick is
addressing difficult questions. She is not addressing fluff. But that’s
a strength. She cuts through the complexity to put her finger on the
key issues, to address all counterarguments and angles, and to make
sense of it for the reader.

4. Length. It is almost 400 pages. But van Schewick
includes several shortcuts–like three charts of page references as
guides for reading the book to answer particular questions.
(Policymakers will likely rely on those charts.) The way I look at it:
the book itself is a short-cut. It may take one or two weeks to read.
To get a similar grasp of these issues, I would otherwise have had to
spend ten long years locked in a library, reading and analyzing the
global literature on Internet engineering, economics and innovation,
legal policy, and business-managerial decision-making, all while
speaking often to the top thinkers worldwide in all these areas and
eating brain foods to increase my mental ability to keep up with the
task. But, luckily for me, van Schewick spent a decade exploring all
these issues, apparently locked in the architectural economist’s
equivalent of the Room of Requirement, surrounded by books, some full of equations, and top experts.

5. Abstraction. The book at times sets forth
general frameworks and arguments that go beyond, and therefore abstract
from, particular stories and economic conditions. Very abstract models
can be hard to wrap the mind around. But van Schewick’s models are not
too abstract. Plus, a model for understanding complexity is the point
of the book (and of most non-fiction books I have read, from The Tipping Point and Outliers to Freakanomics and The Origin of the Species). Such books are meant to make broader sense of particular phenomena.